ABOUT THIS BOOK

As early as the eighteenth century, white Americans and Europeans believed that people of African descent could not experience nostalgia. As a result, black lives have been predominately narrated through historical scenes of slavery and oppression. This phenomenon created a missing archive of romantic historical memories.

Badia Ahad-Legardy mines literature, visual culture, performance, and culinary arts to form an archive of black historical joy for use by the African-descended. Her analysis reveals how contemporary black artists find more than trauma and subjugation within the historical past. Drawing on contemporary African American culture and recent psychological studies, she reveals nostalgia’s capacity to produce positive emotions. Afro-nostalgia emerges as an expression of black romantic recollection that creates and inspires good feelings even within our darkest moments.

Original and provocative, Afro-Nostalgia offers black historical pleasure as a remedy to contend with the disillusionment of the present and the traumas of the past.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Badia Ahad-Legardy is a professor in the Department of English and Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs at Loyola University Chicago. She is the author of Freud Upside Down: African American Literature and Psychoanalytic Culture.

REVIEWS

"Part Afrofuturistic, part academic, this book will make you rethink how you understand Black history and storytelling." --BookRiot

"Essential." --Ms. Magazine

"Author Badia Ahad-Legardy finds unique ways to explore the beauty, positivity, and triumph of people descended from Africa, creating an archival collection of visual art and culture, literature and performance to demonstrate how the Black experience is not just a depressing string of incidents that drives us through our lives. " --New York Amsterdam News

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